I don’t think I ever “hated” my job. At least, not the actual work. I may have preferred to do other things, but the actual work tasks never bothered me.
What I always hated was the one-way street of the employer/employee arrangement. That by being a mere “employee” you have to eat all manner of shit, subject to the whims of your company, manager, or customers. Indeed, what I have seen in my 20+ years of working is that the attitude of companies is that their employees are a costly nuisance and this attitude has worsened over time. Sure, many highly profitable companies dress this up with stupid perks like free snacks and lip service about “positive corporate culture”. But in practice, these same companies are very quick to reject anyone who doesn’t drink their cool aid.
I recall early on in my career, companies were willing to hiring smart, hard-working people and give them the training to do their jobs. Before that, companies even had pension funds for long-time employees. These days, those same companies are looking to outsource, automate or contract out as many jobs as possible. I don’t think a society can operate like that long term - a relatively small population employed in highly profitable multi-billion businesses with the vast majority working in either low-level service jobs or constantly competing for “contracts” with no stability, benefits or health care. At some point, the government is going to have to step in to provide some basic level of infrastructure and social safety nets.
I think the corporate kool-aid thing is a very distressing thing. It’s a perversion of the worker/company relationship of yesteryear where the company demanded loyalty and sacrifice, but generally provided stability, security and a chance for advancement. Now it’s that the company demands at least as much loyalty and security as before, but now they’re just giving you a paycheck, without the stability, security or chance for advancement. And if you recognize this, and don’t play along, they view you as disruptive, or not sufficiently committed or whatever.
Like you say, free snacks or other trivial perks don’t make up for that particular imbalance. I kept thinking about it at previous jobs when having to work over my Xmas time off, or being up at 1 am working on things, etc… and realizing that I wasn’t getting anything EXTRA for it; they were just expecting without any additional consideration for my sacrifice, and I wouldn’t be any more protected from a layoff or bumped up in line for a promotion or a raise either.
At the same time, it is harder and harder to find employees who will be loyal and dependable, no matter the loyalty and security given. Not sure which got eaten first, the chicken or the egg.
The bottom line is sacrosanct. If you have investors or stockholders, then they will demand that you wring every drop of productivity out of your employees as possible, at the lowest compensation for their time and effort as possible.
Pretty sure the employers broke that one back in the 1970s and 80s with all the layoffs they did back then- it really was a shock to a lot of people who had never heard of that kind of thing. And I think repeated layoffs just reinforced that there’s no gain to being loyal for employees these days.
I mean, no company is going to come out and say “We won’t lay you off, no matter what.” or “We guarantee you at least a cost-of-living raise each year.” Absent that, where’s the benefit in being loyal to the company? Like you say below, you’ll be sacrificed on that profitability altar as soon as it makes financial sense.
IMO, that’s a problem with management selection and training. You get accountants and finance people promoted into c-suite management jobs, and while they can crunch the numbers like nobody’s business, they don’t quite get the people factors stuff. That’s not to say that layoffs aren’t occasionally required, but they shouldn’t look at them as an everyday management procedure either. Layoffs ought to be the corporate equivalent of bomber crews throwing their guns out to stay aloft, not something to do in order to save fuel on the trip home.
I think that mentality comes from the market pressures after a company goes public. Small, privately owned companies can prioritize their people (not saying they all do, just that they can). Once you go public, you’re a slave to quarterly earnings reports.
I agree with you about the layoff issue. I think it’s because companies have moved to “just in time” staffing. If you’re familiar with “just in time” inventory, where instead of maintaining a warehouse of inventory, you set up an active supply chain to move products from the manufacturer to the customer as orders come in. They seem to be staffing this way now, too. Starting a project? Staff up for it. Project coming to an end? Shed those people. New project ramping up? Hire new people for it. This is also what’s behind the increase in using 1099 contractors or sub-contract staff who are W2 to staffing agencies and keeping a very small in-house staff of W2 workers.
Below the state minimum wage. Not the Chicago minimum wage. What that means is for some work you can replace adults with teens. Look, minimum wage bumps in high cost of living cities isn’t good case studies for the effects of national wage policy.
For that we can look at the dislocation of manufacturing and a permanent non-employable class.
You’re probably right about the public/private company difference.
And what you say about the JIT staffing is true too… my favorite is the whole “let’s hire contractors to do X function- that way, it’s not payroll, it’s support or operational expense”, and then they keep the contractors around for YEARS, and then act all surprised and frantic when the contractors get reassigned by their management in favor of a cheaper person, taking all the tribal knowledge and company lore with them. Had they hired a full-timer, that person wouldn’t have been as likely to bail, provided you treat them right.
It’s definitely a different model- it’s a just-in-time and very modular way of doing staffing. And it sounds very much like an accountant-driven model. It’s NOT ideal for getting the best performance out of say… an IT department. It’s NOT something workers enjoy.
And probably most importantly in the long run, it’s not one that’s sustainable. Since it is predicated on the wide availability of competent, available mid-career professionals, it doesn’t have any real room for entry-level and early career professionals. Under this model, companies are not going to want to hire a kid right from college or with maybe a year of experience, because they don’t slot into a modular, just-in-time slot in most companies. They’re looking for someone who can get hired when they’re staffing up, step right in and start working, not someone who will have to have a lot of the basics explained to them.
The last place I worked was much like what you and I describe, and the youngest people there were in their early 30s, outside of the 2-3 college interns who were there the last 3-4 months I was there, and some of the very low level PC support/helpdesk folks. That whole strata of 22-29 year old professionals was almost entirely absent in an IT department of around 150 people. And I know why- they were perpetually looking for people to just get hired and start working, and not looking to train or groom people in any way. Which not coincidentally, was why they were suffering fairly high turnover in the full timers who had been there a while, like me. None of us were getting opportunities for advancement or management roles because they were just doing this JIT business and hiring a manager or senior person with experience, rather than groom and promote from within.